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Paintings

Untitled

1986

Double ExposurePhotographic process on paper

Self portrait of Joni Mitchell against the prairies.

In 'Come In From The Cold' video of her promo videos, Joni says: When Night Ride Home was completed, my husband and I took a well need vacation. We decided to go to Alberta and Saskatchewan, these are the provinces that I was born and raised... ummm... and I would show him all of the small towns that I lived in and... and we would take photographs that perhaps could be used for publicity thereby taking photos in the friendliest and the most natural of circumstances.

He had a new strobe which he hadn't used before and I also had a new camera. Both of us being photographers we would go about 10 miles forward and 3 miles back, one of us would say "Gee there was a grove of trees or there was a barn back there, lets go back". So we would backtrack. We would jump around a field, leap around and take a lot of shots.

There was a lot of memories in these towns, although they changed in many ways, streets that I barely remember I was so young, places I remember quite well - the grain elevators, the tracks across the street from our litte house in Maidstone... ummm... the little war-time house in North Battleford, the fort that we took visitors to see, chinning bar in the prison.

When the pictures came back, much to my husband's dismay, the strobe bleached me out and I was like a ghost on the prairie, like an old, faded, Indian ghost. And oddly enough I was wearing a t-shirt of Geronimo on it and he was really clear and he didn't look happy. It seemed kind of like a commentary for these plains where buffalo had been so disastrously slaughtered.'

(Note from Jamie Zubairi - Joni's penchant for mixing dates up is apparent in this statement. According to the catalogue for 'Voices', these photographs were taken in 1986 and not 1990 like she would suggest...)